2025 Budget: Performances, key to more funds allocation, Reps tells NBTE, Others
By Tom Okpe
The House of Representatives Committee on Federal Polytechnics and Higher Technical Education Institutions, has said performance is key to progress and should be major reason, to justify demands for more funds by agencies in the 2025 budget allocation.
Chairman of the Committee, Rep Fuad Kayode Laguda stated this after a presentation by the Executive Secretary, National Board for Technical Education, NBTE, Professor Idris Bugaje, at the 2025 budget defence session held by the Committee at the National Assembly Complex, Abuja on Friday.
He noted that, there was need for Government Agencies’ to judiciously, utilize resources available to them before asking for more as their performance should determine why more resources should be allocated to them.
He said: “Performance is very key. That is what will help us move forward in 2025. It is an acceptable and known fact that the Polytechnics are poorly funded, but, we need to justify our need for more, and show why we need more.
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“If we speak with each other truthfully, we know we are not doing good in that aspect. Not all of us, but most of us are not doing good in that aspect. The whole essence of this Committee is to bring out the best in us, and put corrective measures where it is needed.”
He also stated that NBTE as a body, is very crucial in the area of technical education, hence, adequate funding for the agency will go along way in ensuring that, technical education institutions are positioned to provide Nigeria with needed expertise and workforce to drive innovation and development.
In his earlier presentation, the Executive Secretary NBTE, Professor Idris Bugaje, in an overview of the Agencies’ 2024 budget performance and the 2025, proposed estimates called for an increase of its budgetary allocation to recruit more personnel, to supervise activities of over 700 Polytechnics and other institutions across the country.
“For personnel, we are looking for an improvement because we have about 700 institutions to visit and our staff strength is at 330, which is very low.
“Similar Agencies’ like ours have more staff, fewer institutions and more funds to carry out their duties, but our personnel cost is very low, so, we want an increase, so that we can inject more hands to do rotation,” Bugaje said.
Speaking on the agency’s Internally Generated Revenue, IGR, he said there are charges being paid by institutions which he said are not constant but based on some activities and, charged during accreditation visits and some other activities.
“We have about 200 programs, which also need to be increased, introduce contemporary ones. it’s not every year we visit every Polytechnic on all these programs.
“For that reason, this current year, our IGR is extremely low, just about 25 million. Our Capital performance for 2024 is 50 percent and yet to get the remaining.” he added.
